Tim Nicholson was sacked last summer from his job as an environmental policy officer at Grainger plc. During an employment tribunal in London this week, a judge ruled Nicholson had the right to claim protection from discrimination based on his conviction that climate change is society’s greatest environmental threat.

Nicholson says he tried to get Grainger management to better reflect the firm’s stated environmental policies in its actual practices. At the employment tribunal, he presented a list of examples in which the company did not live up to its expressed goals.

They included instances in which senior staff declined to provide him with data to enable him to calculate Grainger’s carbon footprint, and an unwillingness on the part of executives to respond to his call for less corporate air travel.